Safety and health become the 8th dimension of BIM

Ignasi Pérez-Arnal / @iperezarnal / Fotos: Westudio

María Ángels Sánchez, vice president of CAATEEB presents EBS Day on BIM and safety and health

The innovation that the BIM environments produce in the area of ​​health and safety was the topic of discussion at the session organized by CAATEEB on February 9 and presented by the CAATEEB vice president, María Ángeles Sánchez. Four different views addressed the latest research on the incorporation of BIM into safety and health at the project and implementation stage.

The conclusions are clear: the need to incorporate the safety and health coordinator into the collaborative process favoring BIM, the need to think about safety and health throughout the life cycle of a construction – from project to maintenance – and last, but not least, the possibilities of offering new job opportunities through the new services generated by BIM.

Ione Ruete, director of BBConstrumat, presented the BIM Space

Ione Ruete, director of Barcelona Building Construmat, opened the session presenting the new commitment that Fira Barcelona will make with the digitization and new technologies that have to become the engine of the construction sector. As a value proposition that must involve innovation, knowledge and business, she presented the BIM Space, a space that together with the areas dedicated to industry, the future, business meetings and debate, is created on the basis of an agreement between BBConstrumat and the organizing committee of the European BIM Summit, formed by CAATEEB, buildingSMART Spanish Chapter and BIM Academy, and that must help the future of this industry to acquire the commitment and the complicity of all the agents that take part in construction sector to continue advancing.

BIM4Safety, the BIM to reduce accidentality

Mikel Borràs, from the R & D department of the IDP engineering firm, located in Sabadell and with more than 500 technicians from 5 countries, described the BIM4Safety program. This is a program within the framework of the Ministry of Development’s challenging projects, endowed with € 860,000 and, in the area of ​​simulation of processes to improve decision making, focuses on what information and communication technologies – such as BIM – can introduce to develop monitoring systems for the improvement of safety in the execution phase of buildings and also of civil infrastructures.

The challenge is to reduce the number of accidents and eliminate risks using BIM and reduce the health costs associated with casualties. And that, in this way, can be optimized productivity, improving the knowledge created for monitoring and supervision, organizing the works through visual platforms. The project is based on creating adequate sensors (implementing technologies better than Bluetooth and Wifi like the UWB to capture positioning data and actions that are taking place) to create corrective and preventive actions as soon as possible (automated expert systems and big Data from the entire work site) during the operation phase.

Attendees collect the most interesting information from the session with their mobile devices

The BIM, new tool for CSI chapters

This is how we could define the intervention of Carmelo López, from the School of Engineering and Architecture of UNIZAR-University of Zaragoza -the only university in the whole country that combines engineering and architecture in a single department-, who is dedicated to the reconstruction of accidents since 2008,

The results of a reconstruction of occupational accidents are used as judicial evidence or documentation of cases that have happened to people. And this is where video games come into play. In a first expert phase, all the information that will be used in a technical phase of 3D modeling of the scenario where the event that must be reconstructed studying the clothing, environment and actions happened, is collected. The choreography of the event goes to a computer phase introducing the geometric information of the people and their movements until they simulate what happened.

In fact, to simulate an accident is necessary the achievement of different technologies and software such as digitization of people, drones, virtual reality devices, animation software, motion capture … A debate opened on who is the technician most adequate to make the reconstruction of an accident: a labor inspector, a technical architect … and not a computer scientist or a videogame creator. New profiles to incorporate into the next series of the popular CSI.

A moment of Julio Calle’s presentation

Easy software, BIM softwares

In a practical and real time session, Julio Calle deepened on the capabilities of a software that allows to easily simulate and model the objects involved in the building. A cumbersome process normally, this type of software saves projects that made in different formats are difficult to group in a single model.

The power of a software like SketchUp of the Trimble platform is summed up in the ability to combine sound, drawing, photo, video and alphanumeric data in a model and in a single program that allows to absorb any format. Associating information to the ability to draw / model with a very simple tool although the data is very complex seems to allow the democratization of BIM. In fact, the second prize of BIMTecnia, awarded last December in Valladolid, was for a team from the University of Cuenca that developed its molding with this platform.

Victoria Piera, CAATEEB’s Health and Safety Officer, described the pioneering and recognized program of New York City. With the name 3D Site Safety Plan, the NYC Department of Buildings can present 3D building and demolition safety plans using BIM environments. The management system is so advanced that it allows the approval of plans automatically from the web.

Compulsory for the construction or demolition of buildings of more than 10 plants, for restorations of buildings of more than 15 plants or occupying more than 9,300m2 … but also of voluntary use, it allows shortening the granting of licenses since it is a step prior to the works license.

And this can be perfectly understood when we see what it encompasses: 3D visualization of the site, visualization of construction planning in 4D, identification of potential risks and planning of workflows in the project phase; while in the execution phase the working conditions, the ways in which the worker is formed and the individual task scheduling are evaluated, something that is forgotten in the constructions in our area.